Dan Hodges is a former Labour Party and GMB trade union official, and has managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation. You can read Dan's recent work here

Ed Miliband has entered dangerous territory – the lead

Leading from the front - but it's what's behind Ed Miliband that should worry him

The Tories are imploding. Labour has surged to a double-digit lead in the polls. Ed Miliband needs to start seriously watching his back.

Until about a month ago the debate among members of the shadow cabinet was over the best way for Labour to lose the 2015 election. Some people were arguing for an “’83 strategy”; allow Ed Miliband and his ra- tag band of new politicos to put their liberal north London prospectus to the voters, watch it go down in flames, and then let the grown-ups come in and pick up the pieces. It’s what the moderates basically did to Michael Foot – or more accurately Tony Benn – when they allowed him to turn Labour’s 1983 election manifesto into “the longest suicide note” in political history.

Others have been advocating “damage limitation”. Dump Ed, get in Yvette Cooper, try and keep the Tory majority to below 20, and then let Cameron’s crazy backbenchers eat him alive.

But over the past few weeks, the mood has started to shift. Some Labour MPs whisper it warily, lest they be overheard and ridiculed. Others worry that giving voice to their hopes may jinx them. A couple secretly fear they are simply going around the twist. But it’s there all the same: the thought that maybe – just maybe – Labour could actually win the next election.

“I’m starting to think the Tories may be screwed,” one MP told me this week, before rapidly retreating behind a whole list of caveats: Labour’s organisational problems; the party’s funding crisis; the policy vacuum. And then, inevitably, that great big hulking Mac Daddy caveat of them all – Ed.

This is the new danger shimmering into view for Labour’s leader. What if, rather than being resigned to defeat, his hungry troops start to get a whiff of power? See Downing Street not as a mirage but a very real, if still distant, oasis? And then begin to look around them and say “Now who’s the best person to get us there?”

Ed Miliband would obviously throw his hand up and shout “Me!”; and to be fair, he can point to some recent successes. There was the masterful demolition of George Osborne in his Budget response. His construction of the “Tory Toffs” narrative has now stuck limpet-like to David Cameron and his Cabinet. And some insiders even claim Tim Livesey, his new chief of staff, is finally starting to get a grip on Labour’s very own omnishambles: the leader’s office.

But it still sits there. Mocking, taunting. The Caveat.

Even Ed Miliband’s most devout supporters would have to concede that most of the Tories' recent woes have been self-inflicted. All it needs is Abu Qatada to be photographed walking past the Home Office, munching a pasty and lugging a jerrycan of four-star, and their month from hell will be complete.

But despite all this, and the Tory slump in the polls, David Cameron continues to outperform Ed Miliband in the approval ratings, Labour’s leader again failed to land a killer blow at PMQs, and there is scant evidence the public yet see him as a future Prime Minister.

What Miliband must be wary of is the Livingstone Effect: the perception that he is a liability, rather than an asset, to his party. In London that looks set to cost Labour dear, even though some in the Boris Johnson camp are becoming nervous about the impact a presumption of victory and declining national support may have on Tory turnout.

Labour Kremlinologists have also noted with interest the double-page spread into today’s Daily Mirror, in which the party’s most influential media supporter has produced a double page spread on “A Political Giant Reborn: David Miliband back on the campaign trail”, which helpfully includes a photo of Labour’s lost leader walking down "Downing Street", in Halesowen.

My own view is that despite David Cameron’s Keystone Kops routine the fundamentals remain unchanged. We are midterm in the parliament, and despite the Tories' mini-crisis, Labour is still below the levels of support required to represent a serious political threat to the coalition. The next set of growth figures will be massively significant, and were they to show a slip back into recession that would be a massive vindication for Ed Balls and a boost for Labour’s battered economic credibility. But the economy will stutter into life eventually, and when it does the narrative will likely change again.

But Labour are like a condemned man who has just noticed his jailer has absent-mindedly left the keys in the cell door. Freedom is a long way off, and the chances of a successful breakout are unlikely. But desperate times make for desperate men. And desperate men can be dangerous.